Those who are questioning the leadership of the Peoples National Congress Reform are wasting their time. There is no possibility whatsoever that a new leader will emerge from the Congress of the main opposition party in Guyana , come August of this year.
The present leader Robert Herman Orlando Corbin is firmly entrenched and since the PPP is keen to have him as a leader of PNCR for some years yet, they will not do anything that can jeopardise his position.
The PPP believes that it stands more than a good chance of winning any election against Uncle Bob and therefore they will want him to remain as leader of the PNCR for sometime yet. The PPP won the last election because the main Presidential candidate was tailor-made for the opposition. At the same time, the PNCR was coming up against a highly popular young leader with a great deal of voter appeal.
The PNCR is not likely to pose any major challenge to the PPP so long as they put forward a candidate that is perceived by the supporters of the ruling party as belonging to the old guard.
Unfortunately, there are not very many persons within the PNCR who are in a position to challenge Uncle Bob for the position of leader. There may be many pretenders to the throne but I am willing to bet that very few will come forward to throw their hats in the ring against Uncle Bob and I am willing to bet that in any election for leader of the party, these pretenders will be humiliated.
The PNCR does not have power but it does not need power to keep its support base intact. The PPP did not need any tonic of office to win power. The PPP was ignored by the intellectual and middle classes during its 28-year banishment as an opposition party.
The PPP won the 1992 elections without the tonic of office but when they got into office they offered a type of tonic to the privileged classes Those who came forward for the special tonic, did so after the PPP won in 1992 and many more are likely to come forward to drink this tonic before the PPP's tenure is over. The majority of those who are today enjoying the tonic are those who wanted nothing to do with the PPP while they were in opposition.
The PNCR can be assured that so long that it is likely that they can win an election in this country they will have droves of persons, including many of those who are today seen parked in front of Freedom House, willing to drink tonic. But to win an election in Guyana does not require the tonic of office.
The PPP won because free and fair elections allowed this to happen. Of course there was ethnic determinism; to deny this is to deny the truth, but the PPP won an election without the tonic of office and subsequent results have in terms of the returns of the PPP been only marginally different from what was secured by the PPP in 1992.
The PNCR, it must be recalled, pulled almost the same percentage of votes at the 1992, 1997 and 2001 elections. It was only last year that the PNCR's support declined dramatically. While the PNCR won Linden , its support in that once impregnable region, incidentally the same area where a number of senior PNCR leaders are from, declined significantly. At the same the support for a new political party, the Alliance for Change was impressive in its first outing at the polls.
All of this has lead to an examination of the leadership of the party. However there is not likely to any major change because as mentioned there are no contenders capable of unseating Uncle Bob.
What will also get in the way of unseating the incumbent leader is also the desire of some within the PNCR to link the need for improved leadership with a thrust for shared governance.
Shared governance is an idea whose time has not yet come. Guyanese are not yet ready for executive power sharing which was one of the policies that PNCR had advanced in the election campaign.
The Peeper had warned the PNCR that this concept would cause problems because the PNCR was insistent that should that party win the elections, they would bring the PPP on board. This must have caused problems for many of their supporters who may have not found favour with supporting the inclusion of the PPP in a PNC-dominated government, especially considering the many bad things that their party was accusing the PPP of.
The PPP and the PNCR entered into a temporary arrangement after the elections concerning the Chairmanship and Vice Chairmanship of a number of regional seats. This act of political cooperation is a demonstration that despite their differences, the two largest political forces in Guyana can still find areas to cooperate whenever their political bases are threatened by an emerging Third Force.
This form of political cooperation will however never evolve into executive power sharing since the PPP will never share power unless it is necessary for them to retain power. In this context therefore the PNCR leader made an accurate observation when in the past he noted that for shared governance to materialise the PNCR would have to win power.
You cannot share what you do not have and nothing that the PNCR does can force the PPP into sharing power. Thus power sharing as a tonic for revitalising the support of the PNCR will not work. It is only if that party wins political office can it hope to dispense the tonic of shared governance at the executive level. And even then it will have to contend with the bourgeoisie class lining up for its share of the medicine.